Asparagus pee, Gooblek & Other Neat stuff

Every once in awhile, an obscure word like desiderata creeps into my awareness, and I wonder what it means. Here’s what that one means: the poem from 1927, Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata”.

I used to have this friend who thought the best way to open a conversation with someone he’d just met was to walk up to them and say, “So, do you believe in God?”

It wasn’t because he was a particularly religious man – he lived in L.A. and watched way too much of Dr. Gene Scott, but other than that, I think it was pretty much just honest curiosity and a firm desire to cut to the chase in everything that he did.

Well, I have pretty much decided that a really good day for me is if I find a reason to cry for beauty. I know that sounds fruity, but it feels really good, and I’m running about 7 days out of 10 where I can find something as beautiful as that bag that blows around in the wind in American Beauty to cry about. Often it’s a song on the radio or a passage in a book, but sometimes it’s just an item in the news, the way my daughter looks when she’s asleep, or the fact that every vining plant in my yard winds counter-clockwise around whatever it’s climbing on – there’s a beauty in it all that I find poignant, and I like it.

So in memory of Tom, I’m considering walking up to strangers and asking them, “So, when’s the last time that you’ve cried over the sheer beauty of it all?” and they’ll look at me like I’m crazy, but that’s OK. (I actually tried this on a guy in his mid-50’s who was a cattle rancher that I met in a bar at the Phoenix airport, and he definitely didn’t get it, but we still had a nice conversation about cattle.)

In case it’s not obvious, this is one of those, “Yes, I’m still here,” posts.

I spent most of the last week or so driving around between Kansas City and south central Iowa, and I haven’t posted in, like, forever.

Nonetheless, I’m still out here thinkin’ and writin’.

While I was driving my Hyundai Accent around on “Clean Burning Iowa Ethanol,” I heard a few good songs on the local alternative station out of St. Joseph’s MO, which I believe was called KJO. (Speaking of ethanol, it was amazing &#151 the 89.5 octane unleaded with ethanol was 6 cents cheaper than the 87 octane without.) But the really nice thing about driving a Hyundai rental is how good my old ’89 Honda Accord feels when I get home.

The first good song was Breathe, by Anna Nalick. If you go to her website, and I think you should, I’d encourage you to listen to the sample for Wreck of the Day. Breathe has a cool lyric, though: “Life’s like an hourglass glued to the table.” Check it out.

The other song I liked a lot was Almost by Bowling for Soup. This from their FAQ page: “Why not Bowling for Stew? Because that would suck.”

Please click that “Bowling for Soup” link now, watch the Almost video and go look at Random Thoughts. Here’s a sample:

• You know, no one is born a menace to society. That shit takes work. – Jaret
• I wish I could have met the guy who coined the WORD “fart.” I’ll bet he had a few more up his sleeve. You know he had a few that were even better. – Jaret
• I was so glad when I found out that masturbation is normal. I thought I was going to be the only blind kid with hairy palms. That didn’t really worry me. I don’t want to offend the hairy-palmed people of the world. You look fine. It looks really good on you. What does it feel like to pet a dog? (emphasis mine – CB) – Jaret
• I think if puppies weren’t so damn cute, that the reptile industry would be booming. – Jaret
• If I could fly, I always wonder if I would still drive early in the morning time. I mean, I can’t even get myself to do 10 pushups…let alone flap my freakin arms up and down 2000 times per second. – Jaret

(If you actually do listen to Almost and you don’t hear people going “bop-bop-bop,” listen again &#151 I only heard it myself just now, and it really makes the song. Jaret rocks.)

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I was visiting with my good friend Bob the other day, and he showed me this model for evaluating projects. The idea is that everyone wants things to be Good, Fast and Cheap, but in real life, you only get two. So if you want to remodel your kitchen, you can go cheap and good and do it all yourself, but it won’t be fast, or you can hire it done and get it done well as quickly as possible, but it won’t be cheap. Or you can hire it done by a bunch of unlicensed people with little experience, and it may be fast, and it may be cheap, but it won’t be good.

He pretty much convinced me that you can apply this model to everything.

Sometimes, I sure wish “we should…” meant “I will.”

TENSILE

Definition:
capable of withstanding physical stress, capable of being stretched or extended

Example:
Architects construct buildings using only TENSILE materials in areas that are prone to earthquakes.

Synonyms:
ductile, malleable

I look at Excite.com everyday for news, stock quotes, TV schedules, etc., and I always glance at the word of the day. Usually, it’s a word I’m familiar with and the definition of say, “Affable,” is about what I expect, but occasionally, there’s an obscure word or a technical term that I don’t recognize, and I take “the word” at it’s word.

So this one today scared me a little. I read that TENSILE means “capable of being stretched or extended,” and I thought, “My, that’s odd. Admittedly, I’ve only heard this in the context of ‘tensile strength,’ but doesn’t this term refer to how much a material like a wire resists being stretched?” And yes, my stream of consciouness internal dialogue does, in fact, sound like a late-19th-century British dandy, or at least one of the Crane brothers from Frazier &#151 I just can’t help it.)

Then I got to the “synonyms” and thought, DUCTILE does in fact mean something like “able to be stretched, molded, or worked,” but, doggoneit, MALLEABLE comes from the same Latin root as “mallet” and means that you can beat something out into a sheet &#151 think “gold leaf.”

So bottom line, I was right, they were wrong, and I’ll never trust Excite’s Word of the Day feature again. (The bold words are links to Google definitions.)

Just finished the book Going Nucular by this guy, Geoffrey Nunberg. He’s like this senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, and the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. (How jealous am I!?).

Anyway, he asks a couple of cool questions, like, if “the pool is deceptively shallow,” does that mean it’s shallower or deeper than it looks? If “she runs best with a minimal amount of food in her stomach,” does that mean she runs best if she doesn’t eat at all, or if she eats just a bit?

I have some pretty strong feelings about all this, and I’d be curious to hear comments from some of my favorite writers (and I think you know who you are).

Last Sunday, we took a day off from work and yardwork to go up to Reno (exactly 100 miles from our front door) to see Maxfield Parrish Master of Make-Believe at the Nevada Museum of Art. Very cool.

If you live within a couple hundred miles of Reno, next weekend is the last, and we highly recommend it.

AFI List of Top 100 Quotes From U.S. Films – Yahoo! News

Next Tuesday, the House of Representatives will be voting on the Freedom to Read Ammendment to the House Appropriations Bill. I hope you’ll take a moment to go to House.gov, and contact your representatives. Here is what I just e-mailed John Doolittle:

Please do what you can to help pass the Sanders’ Freedom to Read Amendment.

One of the most disappointing results of the terrorist threat is the knee-jerk reaction to impose limits on the freedoms of innocent Americans.

The Patriot Act provides for illegal infringements on First Amendment rights that are not supportable in terms of any balanced risk assessment.

Perhaps you share my opinion on this issue, in which case, I salute you, but if not, I hope you’ll consider this carefully when you vote on Tuesday.

Thanks.

So The Lady Janet and I spent the last week in NYC. We went to BEA, the annual booksellers’ convention known as Book Expo America, and met with people from Random House, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Time Warner, etc., and snagged a whole bunch of free books &#151 my current read is God Without Religion by Sankara Saranam (whatever, but not yet published). Here’s our booth.

We stayed in a place just off Times Square, which has an amazing 20-foot Cup O’ Noodles that actually steams. Pretty cool.

The place we stayed at was a new hotel called the “QT” that was very interesting. The front desk was like a snack counter in a movie theater, with packs of gum and cigarettes under a glass countertop, and there was a small swimming pool in the center of the foyer that you could look into from the bar. I just kept thinking that it was “tragically hip,” and our tiny, tiny room looked like this and like this. Yep, that’s about it. Not a chair, not a table, not a drawer, not a hook, just a nice bed with a bench around it and a fridge in the closet.

I had a meeting with one of the publishers in the Flatiron Building. It’s a NYC landmark, but unfortunately, they’re renovating, and the whole exterior was covered in shrouded scaffolding, so you couldn’t even recognize it. But our meeting was in a conference room right in the “point” around a triangular conference table, so that was kinda neat.

By Monday, we were missing Emily really badly, and anxious to get home, and we got on board the airplane from Hell. United 287 was supposed to get us to Denver and on to Sacramento so we’d be home sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 Monday night, but there was a weather situation that delayed all of the flights out of La Guardia about 3 hours, and the full horror story goes something like this:

We boarded the plane at 1:40 for a 1:55 flight. The air conditioning had failed, so it was about 85 degrees on board. They had an “air truck” come out and pump cool air through the vents, so after 15 minutes or so, it really wasn’t too bad.

A few minutes later, we taxied out towards the runway, and the captain came on and said, “We’ll be taking off shortly, but because of some weather delays, we’re currently 22nd in line for take-off.

On United, you can listen to the radio conversation on channel 9, so we’re listening, and around the time we’re going to take off, the contoller says, “United 287, prepare for takeoff,” and our Captain says, “Give me a minute, I need to make a call here,” and Control says, “I don’t know who you need to call, but you’d better make it quick &#151 if you don’t take off right now, you’re gonna be sitting here for a very long time. Captain says, “I need about 20 seconds.”

Control says, “United 287, it’s been 40 seconds, what’s your call?” and the Captain says, “We’re coming back in.”

Turns out that there is a mechanical problem, and the Captain comes on and tells us that there is an error light that they haven’t been able to clear, and the error is “non-deferrable.” So we sit at the gate for awhile and the Captain tells us that maintenance is going to try cleaning the pressure sensors, but that doesn’t work, so they need to get a replacement part, which takes awhile, and they can’t install it right away because now there’s lightning on the runway, and when they do install it, that doesn’t fix it, so they need to get another part, then another.

I’ve made that sound like it took about a half an hour, but it was about 3 or 4 hours, and they eventually let people get off the plane to get food or whatever, but they limited it to five people at a time because of some security issue with too many people on the concourse.

Around an hour later, they informed us that we’d all need to get off the aircraft because the flight crew was running over their allowable service time and had to take a break, so we all got off the plane for an hour or so.

Then they had to test the replacement parts, and after that, they let us back onto the plane. But then they didn’t have enough fuel for the most recent re-route, so we had to wait for refueling.

It went on like this like a bad Twilight Zone episode, where they just kept saying things like, “Well folks, we sure do apologize for the inconvenience, but we think we’ll be taking off in just a few minutes,” but it went on for hours and hours. We eventually made it to Denver about 14 hours after we boarded at La Guardia, and we spent the night at a Days Inn, and got home Tuesday evening.

Blech.